All roads shouldn't lead to courthouse

Saturday

Mar 31, 2012 at 12:01 AMMar 31, 2012 at 10:55 AM

If you think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, let me introduce you to Melvin L. Schweitzer. A state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan, Schweitzer on March 21 threw out a lawsuit by nine graduates of New York Law School claiming the school misled them about their job prospects. They sought $225 million in damages.

If you think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, let me introduce you to Melvin L. Schweitzer.

A state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan, Schweitzer on March 21 threw out a lawsuit by nine graduates of New York Law School claiming the school misled them about their job prospects. They sought $225 million in damages.

There is an important lesson in all this, which I’ll get to in a bit, but first I want to describe the case, which offers lessons of its own about an over-reliance on the judicial system for salving life’s disappointments.

Although its alumni appear amply endowed with chutzpah, New York Law School is not the nation’s premier training ground for legal eagles. Not to be confused with the renowned New York University School of Law, New York Law has a “lackluster ranking and reputation,” according to the plaintiffs. No dispute there. It also charges annual tuition of $48,700.

Yet its graduates do go on to have careers in law — as many of the plaintiffs seem to have done, their complaint notwithstanding. By the time of the judge’s ruling, four of them had found jobs practicing law. A fifth was a lawyer on a contract basis, while a sixth was a paralegal. And two had yet to pass the New York bar exam. As the judge noted, moreover, seven of the nine graduated into the sharp teeth of the Great Recession, a time when things were pretty tough all over.

Schweitzer, who took the trouble to write a 36-page opinion, summed up his view of the case in words that should be chiseled over the doorway of every law school in the country: “Not every ailment afflicting society may be redressed by a lawsuit.”

But what about the claim that New York Law School misrepresented how well its graduates were doing? In general, lesser law schools are notorious for massaging the numbers on this score, but the judge concluded the school’s data weren't misleading, at least not to students shopping for a law school.

Yet New York Law and America’s other second-rate law schools aren’t out of the woods. An appeal is likely in this case. Lawyers for disgruntled grads have brought at least a dozen such cases against law schools around the country, and have threatened 20 more with litigation.

There is something deeply satisfying about discovering that the law schools whose spawn have given us such a litigious society may yet be snared by their own devices.

But while it’s easy to deride such lawsuits — as in the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, it’s hard to know whom to root for — there may well be some value in them. Maybe they’ll force law schools to be more careful in representing their results and to focus more on preparing graduates for the real world of legal practice. Deterring some applicants might eventually reduce the supply of attorneys, which already is more than ample. It would be great to redeploy some of this talent into other areas of the economy.

Much has been made of abuses by for-profit colleges that get students to borrow huge sums for degrees that have little value. The lesser law schools are increasingly susceptible to the same criticisms.

Which brings us to the real lesson of this column, one that should be written on the refrigerator of every family with kids looking ahead to college.

That lesson is: Don’t pay top dollar for mediocrity. It’s tragic to think of students saddling themselves with huge debts to buy a low-quality degree that confers little earning power in the marketplace.

Schweitzer’s view from the bench is that students going to law school should know better. You should, too.

Daniel Akst writes for Newsday.

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